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Geeky Nerdy Dork

In our culture, childhood is seen as this fun time of having no responsibilities and no accountability, while adulthood is viewed as serious and constrained by authority. But to me, this doesn’t seem correct at all. Adulthood contains 9 hours of resigning to corporate law, and the other 15 of doing whatever the heck is desired. Eat 3 servings of ice cream, stay up late to watch baseball, don’t fold the laundry – none of it matters! Childhood is 7 hours of classroom etiquette, and once that’s done, going to 17 hours of parental oversight. Do your homework, finish your dinner, clean your room. If you were like me, the work never ended. Honours, AP, Accelerated, SAT, ACT, all meant that the assignments were difficult and often, and the stress would accumulate. That said, yes, I was quite the nerd. Or geek? Or dork? Which is it?

Dork, Nerd, Geek: often used interchangeably, but argued as being different. I might call a WOW player a nerd one day, a geek the next, but I’m meaning the same thing. Yet, I’d argue that there is definitely a difference between them. As it turns out, they are kind of the same but kind of different.

Close your eyes. Reminisce to about tenth grade. Walk into your precalculus classroom. Turn to the chapter on logic. Find a conditional statements section, and find Modus Tollens. If P, then Q.

A dork is “a person who behaves awkwardly around other people and usually has unstylish clothes, hair, etc.” A nerd requires this same thing, but also requires the person be “very interested in technical subjects, computers, etc.” Finally, a geek must have both the dork and nerd qualities, but not only does the person need to be very interested in the technical subject, they must also “know a lot about [that] particular field or activity.”

I’d say to build a robot, a person needs to know quite a lot about sciencey-things, and therefore they are a geek, and de facto the other two. Which makes the NFL a total geek!! Ya know the Transformers-like mascot that is always on the NFL intros during FOX games? That’s Cleatus, and yes, he’s real.

Made back in the 2005 NFL season and named by a fan write-in, he’s kind of awesome. He appeared one day with no story, no reasoning, they just thought a mascot would be good. And he is! Though he does not look good in a suit. Wow those are some shoulders.